Popular quotes in last 24 hours

The Islamic Revolution, as it turned out, did more damage to Islam by using it as an instrument of oppression than any alien ever could have done.

We were all victims of the arbitrary nature of a totalitarian regime that constantly intruded into the most private corners of our lives and imposed its relentless fictions on us. Was this rule the...

Don't go chasing after the grand theme, the idea, I told my students, as if it is separate from the story itself. The idea or ideas behind the story must come to you through the experience of the...

In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance. This

And even with the book closed, the voices do not stop--there are echoes and reverberations that seem to leap off the pages and mischievously leave the novel tingling in our ears.

Those who judge must take all aspects of an individual's personality into account. It is only through literature that one can put oneself in someone else's shoes and understand the other's different...

I've always kept the pleasurable habit of college times, stressing tickets and notes. Much of my notes of pride and prejudice, the heiress, the hill of the howling winds, Madame Bovary and Tom Jones...

Ourworld in that living room with its window framing my beloved Elburz Mountains became oursanctuary, our self-contained universe, mocking the reality of black-scarved, timid faces in the citythat...

Take any emotion-love for a woman, or grief for a loved one, or what I'm going through, fear and pain from a deadly illness. If you hold back on the emotions-if you don't allow yourself to go all the...

When the girls left that afternoon, they left behind the aura of their unsolved problems and dilemmas. I felt exhausted, I chose the only way I knew to cope with problems. I went to the refrigerator,...

Again she repeated that she would never get married, never ever. She said that for her a man always existed in books, that she would spend the rest of her life with Mr. Darcy-even in the books, there...

Experience had proven that the only way these regulations would be heeded was if they were implemented by force.

He is more rooted to the idea of home. He created this home...and established routines like watching the BBC and cooking barbecues for friends. It's much harder to dismantle that world and to rebuild...

Had I been able to formulate my first impressions of the United States, I might have said that there was a place in America called Kansas, where people could find a magic land at the heart of a...

After the revolution, almost all the activities one associated with being out in public-seeing movies, listening to music, sharing drinks or a meal with friends-shifted to private homes. It was...

Later, Nima told us that the son of one of his friends, a ten-year-old, had awakened his parents in horror telling them he had been having an "illegal dream." He had been dreaming that he was at the...

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Muslim man, regardless of his fortune, must be in want of a nine-year-old virgin wife.' So declared Yassi in that special tone of hers, deadpan and mildly...

You see this is a chair, but when you come to describe it, you do so from where you are positioned, and from your own perspective, and so you cannot say there is only one way of seeing a chair, can...

Between my first book tour, in 2003, and the next one, in 2009, many of the places I visited had undergone a significant transformation or vanished: Cody's in Berkeley, seven branch libraries in...

we are most often rewarded for punishing others, and punished for rewarding.

The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in ones own home." Most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced...

There were many such instances, when expressions of sympathy could not be exchanged. What do you say to someone who is telling you about the rape and murder of virgins-I'm sorry, I feel your pain?

One of those mid -season twilights, when for a moment the air seems to condense in the summer and autumn.

This was Nassrin, or to be honest, this was the two of us together: sharing the most intimate moments with a shrug, pretending they were not intimate. It wasn't courage that motivated this casual,...

We lived in a culture that denied any merit to literary works, considering them important only when they were handmaidens to something seemingly more urgent-namely ideology. This was a country where...

{T}he most difficult part of the fight is not taking aim at the enemy, but rejecting his definition of you.

And so began the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran versus The Great Gatsby

He has demonstrated his own weakness: an inability to read a novel on its own terms. All he knows is judgment

Let Go of the Rice In a world that lives like a fist mercy is no more than waking with your hands open. So much more can happen with our hands open. In fact, closing and stubbornly maintaining our...

Whoever we were-and it was not really important what religion we belonged to, whether we wished to wear the veil or not, whether we observed certain religious norms or not-we had become the figment of...

These people," he had said with his inscrutable smile, "are different from us. They don't care about books and such things.

These characters depend to such a high degree on their own sense of integrity that for them, victory has nothing to do with happiness. It has more to do with a settling within oneself, a movement...

She looked not so much composed as drawn inward. She was one of those people who are irrevocably, incurably honest and therefore both inflexible and vulnerable at the same time.